Dear friends on Hacker News,

DO NOT worry about the 1000 person limit. We'll release more codes if we need to. You are all welcome :). I'm a huge fan of HN. Just please enjoy the course - we spent a lot of time convincing the Founder Institute to release these videos and I hope you like them.

Best, Gagan Biyani

Co-Founder of Udemy gaganATudemyDOTcom

Spoiler alert, that password is "readwriteweb"

First of all I was going to complain that I couldent get in. I was going to reply as an angry raging code monkey and demand a password. Then I kept reading. =\

The first 1000 readers that use the code "readwriteweb" will get access to the course materials, which is currently available by invitation-only.

First off I feel as though I dont know much about how a startup works yet. Im trying to learn so I could eventually launch something in the future.

Watching the first video "Holy shit , my idea sucks" around the 15:30 mark or if you look at the slides, its slide 11, the guy says that an idea "Must be NEW or BETTER".

How true is that? Why MUST it be (only) one of those two?

I was reading one of 37 signals books' "Rework" and they said their model was not to make something new or better, but to simplify. They admit there are better applications out there, jam packed with more features but they found that to be to cumbersom.

If someone from YCombinator watched these videos first before starting up their idea(s), would they be where they are right now? How informative would someone suggest these videos are that has some experience in the Startup field?

We were a Founder Institute company and I thought the Founder Institute sessions were extremely valuable. Those videos are very informative - the people teaching them have all had a major success in their startup careers. Aaron did Mint.com, Adeo has started 8 companies, Phil is CEO of Evernote.

Gagan

Go through phil's talk he covered how you can work on 'simplification' of existing ideas, example he has given is video camera.

Simple would be "better" I guess.

In that case the word better is relative in both the presenters point of view and 37signals.

It's great way for udemy to acquire 1000 more users! Provide some free course, 10% of those 1000 will buy several paid courses, each one ~ $100.

Why are they limiting it to only a 1000 people?

It also forced me to go register without reading anything about the course and site, because only 1000 invites were available, and HN just linked it.

Is there a time limit on these courses - i.e. after x amount of time will content access be disabled in exchange for payment?

No - not for free courses. This course is meant to be free forever.

great way of finding out whether you have the xfactor :)